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Rebels attack gas line causing fire, blackout in Damascus

04 January 2014 03:44 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Terrorists targeted a key gas line in the countryside of the capital Damascus Friday evening, causing a huge fire and a major blackout in Damascus and the southern region in general, the country's oil minister Sulaiman Abbas told the official SANA news agency, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

The terrorists targeted the Arab Gas pipeline in al-Baitarieh area in the countryside of Damascus, causing a huge fire that lit up the dark sky of Damascus and halted the gas flow into electricity-generating stations in the southern region of Syria.

Simultaneously, other radical rebels targeted another key power line in the coastal city of Banyas, also causing electricity outage in that area.

The attacks are the latest in a series of other attacks by the al-Qaida-linked rebels who have been focusing on the country's infrastructures amid governmental efforts to keep the citizens' necessities.

2.5 million residents in Damascus have grown used to frequent power outages amid an escalation of military showdown in the city' s suburbs that has badly destroyed the country's infrastructures.

Last week, Syria's Minister of Electricity Imad Khamis said that the capacity of the power generating stations in the unrest- torn country had dropped to 50 percent due to the rebels' attacks.

"The capacity of the power generating stations has dropped into 50 percent after the armed terrorist groups targeted the fuel, gas pipelines, and voltage towers which negatively affected the Syrian citizen's life, public and private companies," Khamis said.

Syrian official media reported in September that financial losses of the energy sector alone amounted to 2 trillion Syrian pounds (140 billion U.S. dollars) since the outbreak of the war in March 2011.

Meanwhile, the electricity minister revealed that his ministry had signed 20 contracts with Indian companies during the last three months with 60 million Euro value.